Theories
Cognitive psychology

Without an understanding of the processes underlying intelligence it is possible to come to misleading, if not wrong, conclusions when evaluating overall test scores or other assessments of performance.

Suppose, for example, that a student does poorly on the type of verbal analogies questions commonly found on psychometric tests. A possible conclusion is that the student does not reason well. An equally plausible interpretation, however, is that the student does not understand the words or is unable to read them in the first place.A student seeing the analogy, audacious : pusillanimous :: mitigate : ?, might be unable to solve it because of a lack of reasoning ability, but a more likely possibility is that the student does not know the meanings of the words.

A cognitive analysis enables the interpreter of the test score to determine both the degree to which the poor score is due to low reasoning ability and the degree to which it is a result of not understanding the words. It is important to distinguish between the two interpretations of the low score, because they have different implications for understanding the intelligence of the student. A student might be an excellent reasoner but have only a modest vocabulary, or vice versa.

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